Lighting help?

brettnuckles

Hi folks, I'm new to Daz3d and I am desperate for some help here. Here's the situation. I've been toying with creating characters, and I want to light them as reference for an illustration. But I can't understand how the lighting system works. Here's my issue, to illustration:

With no lights added to the scene, my character looks like this in the viewport and render, a lot of ambient light with some extra light coming from the right side. Is that the default lighting or what?:

http://i.imgur.com/9ngWfM0.jpg

 

Then let's say I add a poitn light, in the viewport it is lighting the left side of his face. But when I render, the lighting looks the same as it did in the first render, but not the right-side lighting is even stronger. What gives? No matter what lighting I add, spotlights, distant lights, point lights in any configuration, all it does is render the scene the same way, with that right-side lighting. What gives?

http://i.imgur.com/JUslAPh.jpg

No matter what character I try to light, no matter what lights i add to the scene, the rendering light is always just this riht-side light and nothign more. 

 

Cris Palomino

1) Are you using Iray?

2) You have posted the same image twice.

brettnuckles

1) Yep I'm using Iray.

2) I feel silly for posting the same image, oops! I fixed it with the correct images. Thanks for taking the time to respond, I really appreciate it.

Richard Haseltine

When there are no actual light nodes in the scene DS uses a headlamp shining from the camera, unless you turn it off in Render Settings (affects all cameras/views) or on the camera itself. So in the first render you have the light from the Ruins.hdr, strongly from the side, and the ehadlamp in front - in the second the point light has turned the ehadlamp off so it's no longer acting as a fill and you just get the Ruins.hdr and a tiny contribution from the point light (think of the effect of a single light bulb outdoors on a fairly bright day).

BeeMKay

As Richard said, you biggest "enemy" might be the camera light. You can turn off the headlight in the camera parameter settings. You also can change the setting in the render settings, to say "Headlamp: Never".

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/110771/natural-iray-lighning-for-rooms#latest The thread has some information about lighting in Iray, with some examples you might find useful.

brettnuckles

Ooh this is all interesting. The environmental map was not something that I knew about. So I'm tinkering with the render settings now. Here's what I want. I want to be able to put in a spotlight, and a fill light, and have only those two lights lighting my character in the Iray render. I thought that turning off the environmental map might allow me to do that. But when that is dialed down, and I put my lights in, those lights are VERY dim, even when their intensity is turned up all the way. Is it possible for someone to tell me a quick settings configuration to light in Iray with only the lights I put into the scene? I will go ahead and try to read up on Iray, but perhaps that's a relatively easy question to answer :) 

scorpio

Are you altering the Luminous of the light does need to be way up 00000 up, don't use the intensity, the intensity only alters the light for use with 3dl.

brettnuckles

That was exactly the thing I was missing. Thanks Scorpio, I'm all set now!!

Tobor

I think the intensity dial does work in Iray, but it's not photometric. It's a linear control of the light output itself, whereas the luminosity control respect the photometric response of the human eye. Mostly subtle differences, but differences nevertheless. So, it's best to keep Intensity at 100%, and control the lights with the lumens dials instead.

 

Novica

Here's a tutorial I did which may help you.  It explains some of the Tone Mapping sliders too.